What motivated an absolutist Erastian who rejected religious freedom, defended
uniform public worship, and deemed the public expression of disagreement a
catalyst for war to endorse a movement known to history as the champion of
toleration, no coercion in religion, and separation of church and state? At
least three factors motivated Hobbes’s 1651 endorsement of Independency: the
Erastianism of Cromwellian Independency, the influence of the politique
tradition, and, paradoxically, the contribution of early-modern practices of
toleration to maintaining the public sphere’s religious uniformity. The third
factor illustrates how a key function of the emerging private sphere in the
early-modern period was to protect uniformity, rather than diversity; it also
shows that what was novel was not so much the public/private distinction itself,
but the separation of two previously conflated dimensions of publicity –
visibility and representativeness – that enabled early-modern Europeans to
envisage modes of worship out in the open, yet still private.